- Acute myeloid leukemia with multilineage dysplasia: the diagnosis of AML-TLD must be confirmed by a bone marrow aspirate and/or biopsy within two weeks prior to registration; NOTE: there must be evidence of >= 20% blasts on the review of the bone marrow aspirate and/or biopsy; AML-TLD will be interpreted to include patients formerly diagnosed by French-American-British (FAB) criteria as refractory anemia with excess blasts in transformation (RAEB-t), as well as patients with no history of antecedent hematologic disorder who have AML which meets criteria for AML-TLD by World Health Organization (WHO) criteria; patients with AML-TLD must have a white blood cell (WBC) =< 30,000/mm^3 documented within 4 weeks prior to study entry (two sets of counts that are 2 weeks apart will be taken); patients whose WBC has doubled within this period of time and is greater than 20,000/mm^3 at the time of screening will not be eligible